The Law: Mr. Smith Comes to the A.B.A

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Moving through the crowd, the white-haired, chunky, effervescent lawyer works as hard as a campaign politician. A crunching squeeze of the arm for one man, a glad-handshake for the next, hugs for all the wives. Then, with his back-country Florida drawl, he exhorts his fellow attorneys—this time about the need to weed out incompetent practitioners perhaps, even by requiring periodic retesting of lawyers. It is all said with an ingratiating charm and leavened with warming phrases about law as the "major bulwark between man and his government." At the finish, there is a loud ovation. But the radical proposition has not been missed. An elderly attorney corners the speaker afterward and growls: "You son of a bitch,I'm going to write a test that you'll fail."

As the current president of the American Bar Association, Chesterfield Smith has been more than fulfilling the traditional task of addressing just about any law school, local bar association or legal group that invites him (estimated totals for the 18 months, since be became president-elect: 200 speeches and 225,000 miles traveled). Unlike some of his predecessors, however, doling out Pollyanna platitudes. He sticks to his mission: to shake up the A.B.A. and the entire legal profession.

Time was when A.B.A. president were not down-the-line conservatives could at least be counted on to avoid controversy. Smith leaps into disputes at every opportunity. He has, for example, made no secret of his opposition to criminal penalties for marijuana possession. Speaking to a group heavy with former A.B.A. presidents, he suggested that his predecessors should be seen and heard from less. At a meeting of local and state bar presidents, he told his colleagues that they ought actively to encourage malpractice suits against inept lawyers.

He stirred his biggest ruckus just two days after President Nixon fired Archibald Cox. Smith condemned "this defiant flouting of laws and courts." The Louisiana Bar Association voted to censure Smith for his stand. Last week, at the A.B.A.'s midyear meeting in Houston, halfway through Smith's twelve-month term in office, some delegates were still grousing about "Chesterfield's outspokenness." Smith's Watergate stance, said Texas Bar President Leroy Jeffers, was an intemperate "catering to the popular passions of the time. Let American lawyers be no part of such rotten and shabby business."

Despite the complaints, Smith has managed to accomplish some important internal housecleaning. Among his rulings: any lawyer with more than six years' service on an A.B.A. committee must step down; committee chairmen may serve no more than three years; no one may serve on more than one committee. Said a St. Louis lawyer who was bumped from a committee as a result: "It was traumatic at the time, but it made sense." The organization's House of Delegates has already approved his position on marijuana. Last week it took up a broad array of issues in which Smith has been interested. The delegates: